


The High-Water Mark

by goodnightfern



Series: The Extended MCU [4]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Animal Death, Cultural exchange, Meteor City's Collectivist Culture and Suicide Bomber Cult, Oito-Chrollo Sibling Theory, Original Religious Lore, Other, Post-Black-Whale, Post-Canon, Pura Vida, Quiet Leo/Machi, Religious Reformations, Terrorism, au of my own damn wip, postmortem leopika
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:13:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28720248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnightfern/pseuds/goodnightfern
Summary: The Black Whale came home.Nenis no longer a secret; the times are indeed a-changing. While Meteor City undergoes its own private reformation the V6 finally looks towards responsible waste disposal solutions. While the Hunter's Association struggles with the new intellectual revolution the monks of the wasteland prove to be infinitely adaptable.But progress is slow and undoing fifteen hundred years of history takes time. Though Meteor City's latest and greatest cult leader might be led to water, getting Chrollo to drink is another story entirely.Leorio's just lucky to be here.
Relationships: Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer/Leorio Paladiknight
Series: The Extended MCU [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2126208
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> oreopapi is good for the soul and i'm worried that Retaliation x Retribution might linger in hiatus because I got Shit Going On, man. so have this: in the Happy Post-Canon Land wherein the MC Cult and the Greater HxH Universe maybe, make some progress... this ship is basically "violent antifa tankie meets demsoc m4a" and that is the Yaoi Appeal. I'm just flopping around here. 
> 
> Pura Vida is obviously inspired by Costa Rica.

The locals call it _la mezquita_ , of all the things. Catholicism landed on the peninsula of Pura Vida briefly, lingered in the crumbling cathedral of the capital, and moved on without much fuss. The locals were more trusting of their own traditions than the colonizers who once disappeared their own loved ones inside the mission's hospital. Today San Geordi's sole clinic functions as one of the few clinics willing to partake in the great integration of Meteor City.

This is why Leorio is here, peeling his scrubs from his humidity-soaked chest. Despite Cheadle's constant attempts to lure him back to the world of the Zodiacs, here is where history will be made: in this little village in the cloud mountains, in the trio of shabby folk in grey handwoven robes that glint with strips of plastic, in the man in a ratty black coat leading them.

Chrollo isn't supposed to be here. Usually the Phantom Troupe or Pariston handle most of the dealings in the outside world. Bonolenov would've been ideal. Machi alone or towing Nobunaga would have been fun. Shizuku and Kalluto are sweet, even if their presence means putting up with Feitan. Franklin and Phinks are solid dudes.

Ignore the fact that they're the reason Kurapika is as he is now. Forget that even beyond the Spider the terrorists of Meteor City have killed who-knows how many people. This is progress: the new waste disposal programs introduced in the United States of Saherta, the statements issued by the V6, the ongoing revolution in Kakin. Three words spoken in the endless dialogue of finding a resolution to the intractable conflict that's served as the building block of the world for the past fifteen hundred years.

So the mass murdering cult leader turns international hero.

Leorio swallows, waves, and jogs down the path to meet them.

He's glad Machi is here, giving a brief statement to the local media converging on the mission. She's dyed her hair since the last time he saw her: a subtle blue. She drops her eyes from his curious glance. Waits for the boss to speak first.

"Leorio," Chrollo acknowledges, and gestures to the cultists. "This is Dyenea, Jumps-With-the-Springtail, and a nameless. If necessary, you may refer to them as Half-Ten."

Half-Ten extends one hand and one stump, faintly prickling with aura, and Leorio doesn't ask anything stupid like why not go for five. When Leorio meets him greeting he sees it: an explosion somewhere in the landfills, unexploded ordinance plucked clean of somewhere else and sent to Meteor City.

How to say hello in Meteor City: share your pain.

Jumps-with-the-Springtail says, "Really, sibling?" and Dyenea, impenetrable behind her mask, makes one of the delicate hand gestures Leorio is still unversed in. Chrollo only smiles and extends his own hands.

Back on the Black Whale, during one of his interminable lectures Leorio could never be drunk enough for, Chrollo assured him to exchange such greetings with an outsider was akin to blasphemy. This is the result of the great reformation Chrollo is leading. The result of Leorio's own trip to Meteor City, where the children showered him in leis made of shattered lightbulbs and crow feathers. He doesn't ask too much about what his own role in the death-cult is.

The life-cult, is it now?

He's nearly accustomed to the stifling swamp that is Chrollo's aura. It overwhelms him, oozes beneath his skin, sinks its mud into his eyelids and nostrils and leaves him breathless before Chrollo withdraws.

"There you are," he says softly. "We've missed you, Leorio."

What he means is: I've missed you.

Leorio doesn't reply; Chrollo always knows when he's lying.

* * *

The mission staff is subdued, quiet. In preparation they'd joked about opening the windows, blasting air freshener - as if they don't always keep the windows open, they're in the jungle after all - but Chrollo's very presence tends to scare. Marzel's expression matches the errant gecko stuck on her reception desk: eyes wide, unblinking, staring at nothing. Juan gives a hurried bow before remembering the greeting ceremony Leorio walked them through this morning: hands flat out, palms up and open.

An open exchange. A fair greeting. Neither is lower or higher than the other. Only Chrollo may hold his hands straight up, given his status in Meteor City, but today he consciously lowers them and concedes to allow his cultists to be given the "grand tour," as Juan squeaks out. Leorio dawdles long enough to Marzel to whisper, infuriated: "You didn't say he'd be coming!"

"I didn't know!"

Machi, withering in passing: "He knew."

The first ward the healers want to see is the intensive care unit, of course. Where the lost causes lie. Juan doesn't understand why, but Leorio does: three years ago these patients would be bundled up with a toe tag and sent to Meteor City. Today the healers listen intently to the Dr. Chavez's description of the tumor eating the patient alive, study the MRI's, and then hold hands in a circle to meditate with absolutely no preamble.

"What's happening?" Dr. Chavez asks, but Leorio tells him to just watch.

Is it insanity that this experimental treatment is allowed on live patients? Cheadle certainly thinks so. Leorio could ask her, then: if she's so concerned, why isn't she here? The field of nen-based surgery is still new to the Association. Too risky, too dangerous.

It took two hundred thousand people slowly dying while their own rulers sapped their nen for anything to change. It took half the fifth tier lying wasted while they panicked in the makeshift cafeteria-turned-emergency-ward until Chrollo and his terrorists took one look and solved all their problems with a goddamn sermon. A bunch of illiterate head cases high on paint thinner and nutritional deficiencies.

The collective nen of Meteor City appears as a faded miasma, every color of the spectrum bleeding together and faded.

_Lost in the light. Together in the shadow._

Leorio blinks, eyes watering.

Though he isn't part of this collective he can still see emitted fingers turning to microscopic blades. A flare turned into a delicate cauterizing tool. Beneath hovering hands the tumor is snipped, decayed flesh recoiling back while the patient gasps. Chrollo hovers over Leorio's shoulder, ever the patient vulture, and his hot rancid breath makes Leorio realize he's holding his own.

"Come," he says. "I need your help."

Leorio snaps out of the trance. "They aren't done yet -"

"No, they're not."

"I wanna see -"

Machi shoots him a look. 

Sure, Leorio's seen it before. Crouched under plastic tarp in one of the makeshift clinics of Meteor City. The chapel of the ancient town is packed with miracles - botched late-stage abortions in simulated wombs of violet nen, pulmonary edemas drained in a sudden seeping puddle of fluid, blood transfusions performed with simple skin contact. Their immune systems are vulnerable, as exposed to each other as they are, and he himself sent Machi the vaccinnes for the healers, but excuse him if he wants to stand witness. He's supposed to be a doctor, not a psycho-shepherd, but Leorio knows better than to argue by now.

While the miracle happens Leorio's here: stuck in front of a vending machine beneath the veranda that wraps around the central plaza of the mission, trying to stop a mass murderer from robbing waterbottles.

"Exchanging currency for the essentials of life -"

"Is blasphemy, yeah, I know," Leorio says, and sticks a bill in the slot. "It's my money. You're fine." One for each healer, one for Chrollo, one for Machi, and then Leorio figures he might as well get a few more to suit whatever whim Chrollo is chasing. It's a whole thing in the culture, giving someone water. 

Chrollo slumps, eyes wet, when Leorio gives him the bounty. "It's not right, Leorio. I can't even bless it for them. I don't know what to do."

"This water isn't polluted, man."

"I know that, but they don't. We can't drink unless it's passed through the collective. These bottles, they aren't even empty, and I'm supposed to fill them myself. Who am I when I can't fill their cups?" 

This is the thing, too. 

No hydrologist has analyzed the water of Meteor City yet. What the residents know is that it's permanently cursed. Thousands of years of pollution and plastic turned the wasteland toxic. What the Association calls the water divination test is the very source of life in Meteor City. It is only because Leorio knows this and has seen it for himself that he knelts alongside Chrollo, unscrews a cap and takes a sip and says, "There you go. I'll bless it for you."

Chrollo touches his knuckles, wrapped around the bottle. His mind is running at a hundred miles per hour. "When we strive to integrate... when we touch the light... in the process of resolution, that which is cursed may become pure. No - when the light offers blessing, we have no choice but to accept. That's within the law of survival, right?"

"You'll get it. They'll listen to you."

Chrollo delivers his line with controlled grace and a winsome smile. Half-Ten graciously accepts their gift. Machi unscrews her waterbottle and takes a gulp, telling Dyenea if Half-Ten can drink it so can she, and all the while Dyenea glowers at Leorio. 

She reaches for a waterbottle and for Leorio's aura all at once, green and sparkling. 

It's like getting crushed under a compactor until he sees it: the rare green of Meteor City, where the compost fields expand under careful care. Young cabbages send up leaves. But Jumps-With-the-Springtail gives him writhing maggots in corpses, and it's too much, all he fucking did was give them water, so when Chrollo tugs him away yet again he simply follows. 

"I want to see my sister," Chrollo says plainly, and Leorio agrees. Just get him away from here.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just stretching a bit.... *the oreopapi and oito kinks in my back pop simultaneously* ah yeah that's it
> 
> oito is an angel but also told kp to kill on sight at the slightest sign of someone being anything less than loyal to her and woble. i thought the sibling theory was silly at first until i dove deep and wruh, i think it's great for her character actually

The chocolate farm is two kilometers down the mud-and-gravel road, smack in between the mission and the main village. The jungle is already turning to cacao trees dripping fat black and yellow pods. Chrollo shivers at the screech of howler monkeys, stops to stare at a sloth in the middle of the road that Leorio knows from experience can stop traffic for an entire day in Pura Vida. A fat stray dog runs up to them, tail wagging.

Leorio used to be scared of dogs. Back in the grey streets of West Fiodelf the strays were mange-patched and snappish. Here Leorio stops to give Skilo a pat and a kiss.

Chrollo's hands are firmly in his pockets, twisting and clenching the fabric.

"You hungry?" Leorio asks. "Grab a banana, they're everywhere."

"The native variety is nearly non-existent," Chrollo says quietly. "All production goes to DOLE Fruits. In Brasel -"

"Yeah, well, it's still the jungle. Plenty of families out here have subsistence farms. It's the beans and rice they import."

Chrollo hms quietly to himself. "I thought Pura Vida could be our siblings. But this place -" he eyes Skilo, happily trotting down the road, with distaste. "It's dripping in decadence."

"Hey, the jungles got its own dangers. Those frogs -"

"Advertise their toxicity in neon colors."

In Meteor City you never know when two plastic buckets might crack in the desert sun. What unholy chemical combinations you might stumble into. A patch of soggy trashbags hiding razor wire, an ocean of invisible broken glass.

A trio of rainbow geckos encrust the sign for La Coati Chocolate, and the dirt path leading to the main complex is only a little muddy. Leorio still stumbles on tree roots and knocks into vines; when he turns to check on Chrollo he shouldn't be surprised to see the jungle is nothing to him. Even the climate doesn't seem to affect him, though his feathers and hair are slightly curling.

Most of the usual work at the farm has ceased. An abandoned cart of cacao, poles dropped and a yucca plant yanked out of the ground and abandoned. They follow the voices to find a crowd behind the farmworker's cabins.

The composting toilets. Naturally.

Woble notices her uncle first, aura spiking up from the crowd as she screams in delight. Chrollo breaks into a jog, flicks a hand, tosses her as she leaps. A lash of black, a soar of white, and they meet in the middle when Woble falls into his arms.

"Daddy, daddy, it's _poop_!" she shrieks, because no amount of explaining can convince her that Chrollo is not actually her father.

"Yes, darling, it's poop," Chrollo agrees. He kisses her and sets her down to go through the ceremonies of greeting. Woble toddles over to "Uncle Rio" to tug him down and confirm again, in a whisper this time, it really is poop.

Well, not just poop. It's customary all over here: when you finish your business in the outhouse you pour a scoop of ash behind you, and then that whole mess is raked in along with the rest of the compost. Considering the lack of processed foods and sugars in the local diet, it's a perfectly eco-friendly solution.

Meteor City's own composting is a desperate losing battle against desertification. Chrollo and the elders keep careful track of the harvest reports; at the latest they raised six successful acres of cabbage while three fell to blight. But no one has thought to use human excrement before and no one can decide if it's blasphemy or not.

Chrollo's barely finished greeting Oito before the debate is on. "It's not much different from when we consume our elders, is it? Well within the law of survival."

"We hesitate to compare the bones of our leaders to the waste of the vessel," a masked figure argues.

"Waste is the castoff of the vessel. It can't transmit the soul. Think of the cicada shells -" and they're off into the disgusting deep-dive characteristic of an average chat in Meteor City. Hey, how's it _going? Ah, it seems three of my festering boils exploded. Shall we share the pus-covered maggots that feast on my wounds? Why thank you, brother, I’d be honored! Care to split a glass of corpse-juice later?_ And so on.

Oito slips through the half-animated, half-nauseous crowd to scoop up Woble and slip Leorio away. Like Leorio, she knows Chrollo all too well.

Seen him at his worst, even.

Saw that monster and knew: better the devil on your side.

She doesn't particularly like Leorio. It was her betrayal, perhaps, that hit Kurapika the hardest. Her brother threw the Succession War into bloody chaos, threw caution and discretion out the window. While every Kakinese civilian discovered their own nen, he set a serial killer on the throne before slaughtering him, too.

Laughed about it, later, when Kurapika furiously interrogated him as to how he'd made it past a man who could see and avert the future and handed him the Scarlet Eyes like an afterthought. (He told Leorio, in private: "Easily. Gave him no reason to suspect me. Besides, no ability can be activated constantly.")

Oito knew about the girls Tserriednich killed, about Chrollo's plans, about the Kurtas themselves, and she wouldn't be standing here today if she hadn't swallowed past it.

Now she says, "Let's make lunch, shall we?" and leads him back to the farmhouse.

They take the yucca and finish stripping the roots in the kitchen. Even the old abuela went off to see the cultists; she left the beans unattended. Woble stands on her tip-toes to watch Leorio chop the yucca. Oito allows her to stir the beans and get the cheese out of the mold. It's fresh farm-cheese, the milk probably pressed from the family cow just this morning. Oito moves around the kitchen with ease while Leorio slowly chops the yucca into tiny pieces.

"I must admit, I miss the tastes of home," Oito chuckles, dumping rice in a pot. "Perhaps we'll introduce stag beetles into the gallo pinto?"

The strange has indeed rubbed off on her. When Leorio went to Meteor City, he took rations. The old gas stove takes a minute to light.

"I like beetles," Woble says nonchalantly. Somehow she's found a frog, but instead of playing with it like a normal kid she's licking her lips. "Mommy, put the frog in."

"Thank you, darling. It'll be perfect for the yucca. Why don't you run along and find some more bugs for Mommy? It's for the residents," she explains to Leorio. "You have to be careful, introducing them to new foods. Woble and I have only been here for a month, but for some reason I simply can't handle spice anymore."

Leorio considers the amount of salt he was about to toss in the yucca. There's salt flats out in the Backback desert, a thirty-kilo trek from the eastern landfill. According to Chrollo it took centuries for them to discover the cure for hyponatremia, but to this day the residents prefer their minerals from clay. The superficial dehydration (as well as the clear luxury of the flavor) are a source of spiritual confusion.

Just a pinch.

The cleaver slams through the frogs spine. Leorio winces. "So you've been here a month already, then."

"We wanted to settle in before welcoming the others. Give them something familiar."

"...So you plan on staying?"

Another slam of the cleaver. "We decided it's what's best for Woble. Wouldn't want her to end up like my brother, after all."

"Chrollo's fine with it?"

"It was his idea in the first place."

Leorio doesn't know to be suprised or not. When the water boils he slams a lid on the yucca. Woble returns with a bounty: two overlong millipedes, a blue-haired spider, three stag beetles. Oito doesn't thank her, only tells her: well done. Hand them over, please.

"Accept my blessing as I accept yours," Woble sing-songs in a tone Leorio recognizes all too well. Chrollo does the same thing. An artifact of the oral culture and long nights spent meditating with VOC fumes.

It isn't healthy for a child to be worshiped.

Wouldn't want her to end up like her uncle indeed.

It's not her fault, Leorio wants to say. She knew nothing but some fantasy story of the magical monks when she tried to save her brother. She believed in it: the place where no child was unwanted, where the dead found new life, where miracles happened, and if she's still beating herself up over something she did when she was seven years old, barely more than a baby herself...

The frog is a pile of ground meat and bone beneath her cleaver. Rubbery skin lies in long strands. She slips them out with bare fingers, nibbles the inside of her lip as she focuses on cutting through. 

She's always lecturing her brother about his nail-chewing habit. The inside of her lip must be shredded.

A whole month and she didn't bother telling Leorio. 

He opens his mouth to say something, anything, and that's when Chrollo bursts through the screen door of the farmhouse. The climate is finally affecting him. "Found some more bugs," he says, rushed and sweating. "And we decided composting toilets are within the law of survival." He straightens when he realizes Leorio is there. Narrows his eyes and glares at Oito. "You told him?"

"Just about Woble."

Chrollo's stare could strip skin from flesh. Swallow it up into some vast and endless gut. Leorio's belly turns to steel when he looks him in the eyes and tells him it's a wise decision. He's proud of him.

When Chrollo sags in relief Woble pulls on him, asking him to show her the bugs. When they end up on the floor in their creepy crawlies while Chrollo lectures on the various gastronomical pleasures of insects, he keeps glancing up at Leorio. Licking his lips like he's about to say something else.

Oito just hums, serene as anything, and throws the frog in to boil.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> god i love my terrorist cult

Chrollo doesn't want to stay for lunch. He's halfway out the door before Oito clangs the dangling cowbell, and Leorio catches a second of brief panic before he arranges his face into the composed soulcatcher.

It is his duty to serve his people. The farmworkers and the family smile bemusedly when the cultists insist on not taking chairs, settling in a makeshift wellspace on the moisture-warped front porch. Chrollo gives Leorio a small, trapped smile before taking his own bowl to join them.

Leorio sticks to the gallo pinto, eats standing up leaning against the doorjamb. He'd never say it aloud but it's funny watching the residents eat. They slurp their gruel with such sweet intensity, smacking their lips and praising their meteor. They won't waste a scrap; Chrollo starts licking his bowl clean before anyone else. Sit him down with the royal family and he'll eat filet mignon with his hands - and then, of course, meticulously lick his fingers clean and wipe them politely on his napkin.

The rest of the Phantom Troupe can condition themselves to eat like outsiders. Machi seems to take pride in it, uses a fork and a knife for pizza. Then again, Feitan only uses knives to violently stab his food and there's no telling with Shizuku, but he's always wondered. Did he teach them to use forks and chopsticks themselves? Did he give them all cautious lectures on how to blend in with the normals? Shizuku gets downright anxiety attacks over her shoes - wearing the right shoe on the right foot, tying the laces absolutely perfect. She once mourned to Leorio that she never had to wear shoes until the Boss took her outside. They never seem to fit her toes

He has to gulp his food too fast himself when he realizes Chrollo's still intent on disappearing.

"That went well," he says once they're back on the village road. "I have faith in our agricultural acclimation. I'm not so sure about the local fishing, though. We don't take well to water." He gives Leorio a sidelong glance, as if that was supposed to be a joke. "You wouldn't believe how hard it was to get them off the continent. They panicked the first time they saw the ocean."

Leorio wondered why they didn't bother with the coastal region. He'd been hoping to stay on white sandy beaches in the more touristy areas, try some of the local squid. Last time he heard from Gon the kid was on a seiner hauling them in by the ton right off the coast of Pura Vida.

Not that Leorio talks to much of the old crew about what he's up to these days. Strolling around the jungle asking the mass-murdering kidnapper if he was ever scared of the ocean.

"I never feared," he says shortly. "I hated it."

Sounds about right.

"Our martyrs rise with the meteor in airships," Chrollo continues. "Our wandering witnesses brave the cursed seas. When I was little I thought they walked like Christ. Either way, if anyone else not thus ordained left it would be blasphemy. So, I posited that our new missionaries, in light of the reformation, might use whatever transport was cheapest. My mistake. Everyone was horribly seasick."

"Poor folks."

"We are survivors," Chrollo says sharply. "We take no pity from outsiders."

The village itself grows slowly. A few bright-painted houses, a few clearings where the ever-encroaching jungle crowds the edges. Chickens pecking, small trash-fires burning, a trio of children chasing a soccer ball who stop to gawk at the strange man in black. The only place that sells tires and gasoline for the next hundred kilos is crowded with motorbikes; Chrollo stares for an overlong time at one stacked impossibly high with crates of pineapples.

"You want one?" Leorio fiddles for his wallet.

"No. I don't eat... fruit."

"Might like it if you tried it," he wheedles. "That's the local variety. Hard to find."

"Thanks to the capitalists who tread upon the wage laborers and invade the natural habitat with their machines," and in a blink he's tucking a pineapple under his coat.

"Pay the man," Leorio barks, but of course it's him who ends up shelling out a hundred jenny.

As the slope of the road decreases and the village proper stretches itself they find more cultists: in curious clusters around the waterpumps, gawking at market stalls, but Chrollo keeps the greetings quick. Something’s wrong, Leorio can tell, and as they approach the coral-pink shack of a schoolhouse that boasts the only three computers in the village he sees the problem: the familiar grey miasma of Meteor City, streaked with black, darkening at Chrollo’s approach.

Part of this cultural exchange was supposed to be a few residents teaching the people of San Geordi nen. Nothing too fancy, just on the basis of equivalent exchange. Things they might use in farming. To keep the roads from washing out once a week and the deadlier fauna at bay.

The bemused villagers on the front porch have no idea the danger they're in. How far away can he get them without inciting a panic? The collective _in_ of the residents can extend for kilometers. At his side Chrollo is turning, sorting the shards in his soul, arranging himself into yet one more role: the Bearer of the Sun and Moon. The living avatar of destruction.

“Keep the pineapple,” Chrollo murmurs, and he doesn’t wait for Leorio to reply.

By the time the schoolhouse door slams behind his back the miasma is black as coal.


End file.
